Want to reduce maternal mortality?

Here’s something I wasn’t expecting: According to a recent report by the World Economic Forum, there seems to be a connection between a country’s abortion restrictions and its maternal mortality rate – the less restrictive a country is, the higher the rate of maternal mortality.

(NEW YORK – C-FAM) A new report from the World Economic Forum (WEF) shows that countries with restrictive abortion laws are often the leaders in reducing maternal mortality, and those with permissive laws often lag. According to the report, the pro-life nation of Ireland has topped the global rankings once again with the best maternal health performance.

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Both Ireland and Poland, favorite targets of the abortion lobby for their strong restrictions on abortion, have better maternal mortality ratios than the United States. Ireland ranks first in the survey with 1 death for every 100,000 live births. In recent years Poland has tightened its abortion law and ranks number 27 on the list with 8 deaths per 100,000. In the United States where there are virtually no restrictions on abortion, the maternal mortality ratio is 17 out of 100,000 live births.

Other regions of the world show similar trends. The African nation with the lowest maternal mortality rate is Mauritius, a country with some of the continent’s most protective laws for the unborn. On the other end of the spectrum is Ethiopia, which has decriminalized abortion in recent years in response to global abortion lobby pressure. Ethiopia’s maternal death rate is 48 times higher than in Mauritius. South Africa has the continent’s most liberal abortion laws and also a high maternal mortality ratio of 400 deaths per 100,000.

Chile, with constitutional protection for the unborn, outranks all other South American countries as the safest place for women to bear children. The country with the highest maternal mortality is Guyana, with a rate 30 times higher than in Chile. Guyana has allowed abortion without almost any restriction since in 1995. Ironically, one of two main justifications used for liberalizing Guyana’s law was to enhance the “attainment of safe motherhood” by eliminating deaths and complications associated with unsafe abortion.

The full report, which I don’t have time to read at the moment, is here. I am both surprised and puzzled – surprised because I would have thought maternal mortality rates had more to do with a country’s overall health and wealth outcomes than with its abortion law or lack thereof. And puzzled because the story doesn’t say anything about what could possibly account for such a relationship (which I am not assuming is causal; it could be, or maybe there’s something else at play, I just don’t know). Maybe the full report explains things a bit better but even if it doesn’t, the numbers quoted above are interesting enough to make us pay attention. What if reducing the number of abortions (if I had my druthers, we’d accomplish this through a change in the culture, not a change in the legal system) really did help improve outcomes for mothers?

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Andrea adds: Abortion is profoundly unfriendly to women–this remains true in spite of a successful public relations campaign to the contrary. So these sorts of result, however casually related, don’t surprise me. True care for women shouldn’t involve abortion, no matter the prevailing zeitgeist, because abortion is not compassionate or caring.

Comments

Looking at the report, it actually doesn’t mention abortion (there is one user of the word in a footnote about how women die from unsafe abortions).

It looks liek someone took the data in this report on maternal mortality rates and combined it with the GDP’s for these countries as well as abortion restrictions. If you notice they compare first world countries to other first world countries. They also don’t include the numbers for a lot of them (4x greater, etc).

I’d be interested in seeing the source data for their calculations. Note, I have no doubt that abortions are detrimental to the health of women, I just like plotting things. 😉

I should note that in a full and proper analysis, I’d expect to see abortion access correlates to lower maternal survival. Not because of any causal link at all, but because abortion law is dependant on the culture of a country, while maternal survival is dependant on the level of economic development, and both of those change together as a country modernises and introduces ideas like gender equality, access to contraception and women’s education and right to work.

Christina: As far as the raw data goes, I think half of it is missing. You can get the maternal mortality figures easily enough, they are in the report. But in order to do any real analysis, you’re going to have to find a way to quantify abortion laws. C-FAM didn’t do that at all – they just picked a few example countries out. That’s why I don’t consider what they did to be valid.

It can be done – it shouldn’t be too hard to come up with a 1-10 scale, with ‘no abortion’ at one end and ‘on demand through to birth’ at the other. It’d just be very time consuming to then research the laws of every single country on which maternal mortality data is available and determine where on that scale it falls. I’d expect it to take a few days, if you devote yourself to it entirely.